And the hindering barriers to the rich man’s life. I have hardly said a word about him, yet I am quite sorry for him, more sorry than for his poor neighbour; but there is not so much need for anyone to look after him, because he himself already does it. He had better be forgotten for a bit, so that he may be helped to forget himself. ‘He that loseth his life shall find it,’ and the good, if unsought, will come to him. When he, with ‘all he is and has,’ goes to reform his neighbour’s conditions, he will find them wondrously interwoven with his own. He will find, if he digs deep enough, that the foundations of both palace and court are of the same material, and also that he both sees further and breathes easier after having melted down his golden walls to frame his neighbour’s pictures. But the Charity Organisation Society could help him. It must help both the rich and the poor. It must make of itself a bridge by which the one set of condition-hindered people can cross to reach the other condition-hindered people; and, as is sometimes the case in fairy tales, the hindrance will in individual cases disappear in the very act of crossing the bridge. I do not mean that the mere meeting will in itself be a social reform, but it will tend to it, and that in the best way. Which of us having once been in a court disgraceful to our civilisation, and yet all that forty or fifty families have to call ‘home,’ would lose a chance of promoting a Sanitary Aid Committee or of getting the law enforced or amended? Which of us, having once seen a Whitechapel alley at five o’clock on an August afternoon, and realising all it means, besides physical discomfort, could go and enjoy our afternoon tea, daintily spread on the shady lawn, and not ask himself difficult questions about his own responsibility--while one man has so much and another so little? The answer would, maybe, have legal results. Which of us, having sat by the sick-bed of the work-worn man (not having relieved ourselves by giving him a shilling), can return and drink for our pleasure the wine which might be his health? Which of us, having become acquainted with the low ideas, the coarse thoughts, the unholy hopes of (pardon the expression) the ‘outcast poor,’ can reject the privilege of self-sacrifice for their help; can neglect, at the cost of any personal trouble, a single effort which will aid their ‘growth in grace’?